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Enough on that point: we come now to the question of memory of
the personality?
There will not even be memory of the personality; no thought that
the contemplator is the self- Socrates, for example- or that it
is Intellect or Soul. In this connection it should be borne in
mind that, in contemplative vision, especially when it is vivid,
we are not at the time aware of our own personality; we are in
possession of ourselves but the activity is towards the object of
vision with which the thinker becomes identified; he has made
himself over as matter to be shaped; he takes ideal form under
the action of the vision while remaining, potentially, himself.
This means that he is actively himself when he has intellection
of nothing.
Or, if he is himself [pure and simple], he is empty of all: if,
on the contrary, he is himself [by the self-possession of
contemplation] in such a way as to be identified with what is
all, then by the act of self-intellection he has the simultaneous
intellection of all: in such a case self-intuition by personal
activity brings the intellection, not merely of the self, but
also of the total therein embraced; and similarly the intuition
of the total of things brings that of the personal self as
included among all.
But such a process would appear to introduce into the
Intellectual that element of change against which we ourselves
have only now been protesting?
The answer is that, while unchangeable identity is essential to
the Intellectual-Principle, the soul, lying so to speak on the
borders of the Intellectual Realm, is amenable to change; it has,
for example, its inward advance, and obviously anything that
attains position near to something motionless does so by a change
directed towards that unchanging goal and is not itself
motionless in the same degree. Nor is it really change to turn
from the self to the constituents of self or from those
constituents to the self; and in this case the contemplator is
the total; the duality has become unity.
None the less the soul, even in the Intellectual Realm, is under
the dispensation of a variety confronting it and a content of its
own?
No: once pure in the Intellectual, it too possesses that same
unchangeableness: for it possesses identity of essence; when it
is in that region it must of necessity enter into oneness with
the Intellectual-Principle by the sheer fact of its
self-orientation, for by that intention all interval disappears;
the soul advances and is taken into unison, and in that
association becomes one with the Intellectual-Principle- but not
to its own destruction: the two are one, and two. In such a state
there is no question of stage and change: the soul, without
motion [but by right of its essential being] would be intent upon
its intellectual act, and in possession, simultaneously, of its
self-awareness; for it has become one simultaneous existence with
the Supreme.
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